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“Be the change you want to see”, he told me…

Yesterday I got into a brief conversation with some guy on Twitter. (Well, obviously brief, because Twitter.)

It started with me living dangerously and retweeting one of his tweets with a comment I was pretty sure he wouldn’t like… His tweet was all about not sitting back and waiting for a better future but actually thinking about what needs to be done to make it happen, and doing it. I said that’s one of the reasons I try to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ – the only hope for a better future. The reply I got was: “Don’t wait for Jesus to save us – be the change you want to see in the world.”

The thing is, it’s not either/or. What is the change I want to see in the world? I want to see God’s kingdom come, I want to see the world under the lordship of Jesus because that is when everything will be ok at last. When the Messiah reigns over us, there’ll be no more suffering, no more pain, no more death even, nobody will hurt anybody else – isn’t that what ultimately we’d all like to see?

So I’m not sitting passively and waiting – I’m doing what I can to bring us closer to that reality, I’m trying to spread the Gospel of Jesus Christ because that’s the only true source of hope for humanity, and each and every person who accepts him as Lord and Saviour is one more person set free from sin and death, one more person starting to taste some of the goodness of living under God’s grace, one more person being gradually changed by God himself from the inside and becoming a more kind and caring and compassionate person.

As for me being the change I want to see? That’s me striving to live God’s way, to keep focused on Jesus and keep letting him transform me through his Word. But I can do more than just being the change I want to see – I can try and spread the message of hope, and it would be extremely selfish of me not to! The world is – I think we’d all agree – in a mess. There is a huge amount of pain and suffering everywhere. And all this pain and suffering is just a small taste of what people face for eternity if they don’t put their faith in Jesus – could I wish that on anyone? No. Could I stand by on the deck of the Titanic and not at least try to get more people into the lifeboats? No way.

Yes, I want a better future. Yes, I know the way to make a better future. His name is Jesus – the way, the truth and the life.